1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a technique for allowing programmers to generate customized displays from memory or from memory dumps, in order to carry out problem analysis of operating systems/programs with differing internal structural format.
2. Prior Art Systems
Computer operating systems characteristically use control structures to maintain order in processing. The control structures of an operating system are small collections of related information pertaining to some feature of the operating system. The system software programs that use these control structures have descriptions thereof embedded in the program code. Refer for example to the dump program referred to as Dpedit used in association with the Honeywell MOD 400 Operating System. Because these descriptions are embedded in the compiled or assembled program code, whenever improvements or alterations are made to an operating system requiring any altering or adding to the control structures, it is necessary to recompile or reassemble any programs that use those control structures that were altered. This becomes a time consuming task. Furthermore, in the past more than one version of a processing program would have to be maintained. When changes occurred to the operating system it was common to simply provide a new recompiled version of a structure-dependent dump program to customers. This meant that multiple versions of the dump program had to be maintained.